Shattered Gulf Coast Asks, `Now What?'

Once-thriving Areas, Left In Ruin, Must Start Over

September 13, 2005|By Campbell Robertson The New York Times

GULFPORT, Miss. — Past the razor wire that has been rolled out along the unusable railroad tracks separating the heavily damaged neighborhoods from the destroyed neighborhoods, lies the port that gave this city its name.

Put generously, it is a mess. The cargo containers are scattered for miles, the poultry freezers are destroyed and 7,300 jobs are in limbo. In the middle of one of the major terminals sits a casino, the Copa, one of a fleet of floating gambling houses that had revitalized the Gulf Coast, pumped taxes into the county and state governments, and provided jobs, directly or indirectly, to about 15,000.

Now officials say eight of the 12 floating casinos appear to be damaged beyond repair, including the Copa, which is slumped onshore, a big pink box with its guts exposed.

If the levees had held in New Orleans, the destruction wrought on the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina would have been the most astonishing storm story of a generation. Whole towns have been laid flat, thousands of houses washed away and, statewide, the deaths of 211 have been blamed on the storm, a number far higher than those from Hurricanes Andrew, Hugo and Ivan.

Mississippi, much like the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, is coping with an almost unimaginable catastrophe largely overshadowed in the media's attention and the national consciousness, in this case, by the disaster in New Orleans.

President Bush on Monday made his third visit to the area since the storm hit. Two weeks since the hurricane, Gulfport and the neighboring city of Biloxi are no longer fighting for mere survival. Power has been restored to everyone who can receive it, gasoline is flowing at the stations and water is gradually beginning to trickle from faucets, though it is still undrinkable. There is even a man in a pizza costume enticing customers to the local Papa John's.

But the tougher question: Now what?

"It looks like we're going to have to build an economy from the ground up" said Connie Rockco, one of the five supervisors of Harrison County, where Gulfport and Biloxi are located.

The casinos employed thousands, but city and county officials said that just as many were employed in businesses directly related to the casinos, such as spas, high-end restaurants, martini bars and pawnshops. They estimated 30,000 were dependent on the crowds that came to gamble.

"What are they going to do?" Rockco asked. "I mean, they're done."

In Biloxi, where most of the gambling business was located, individual casinos were seven of the top 10 sources of tax revenue in 2004, pumping $11.6 million into the city's general fund, and an additional $11.6 million into school and public safety departments.

City revenues for Gulfport and Biloxi are also heavily dependent on the sales tax and property tax, neither of which are going to be pouring in while tourists are absent, residents are struggling to find money for basic needs, and thousands of homes are gone. Harrison County officials estimated that a quarter to a third of the county's residents are homeless. Most homeowners did not have flood insurance, the officials said.

Before the first floating casino opened in 1992, Biloxi and Gulfport were in decline. The seafood industry had been hurting for years because of cheap foreign imports, and the completion of Interstate 10 across southern Mississippi made it easier for tourists to bypass the Mississippi coast for the Florida beaches. By the end of the 1980s, Biloxi was losing people.

But in 1990 the state Legislature voted to allow riverboat gambling and the coast became addicted, quickly.

Tourists began flocking to the area, hotels began sprouting and the retail economy boomed. The seaside towns of Long Beach and Pass Christian, both leveled by Katrina, were flourishing as bedroom communities for people who worked in Gulfport and New Orleans. Tens of millions of dollars poured into the county and city budgets, and new baseball fields and community centers began popping up.

Recently, as coastal real estate has been growing scarcer in Florida, a condominium boom was barreling toward Mississippi's coast. There were more than 50 condominium projects awaiting permits before the hurricane hit, potentially representing thousands of new residents, said Harrison County officials.

Chevis C. Swetman is the third-generation president of the Peoples Bank in Biloxi. He is sleeping on an air mattress in the bank's conference room. As city officials begin talking eagerly of rebuilding, Swetman, who lost six of his 16 branch banks, is less sanguine.

"After Camille you had something to start with," he said. "You had a roof over your head."

Swetman, like most everyone else here, thinks the fate of the Gulf Coast lies with the casinos. And, like everyone else, he believes they will inevitably return, on land this time, if the Legislature plays along.